Bighorn needn’t lose out to oil and gas truckshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/bighorn-needn2019t-lose-out-to-oil-and-gas-trucks
North Dakota's Fish and Game Department needs to stand up and protect wildlifeIt slips into the realm of offensive when a resource management agency is forced to undo its own hard work. The North Dakota Game and Fish Agency recently did just that by helicoptering 26 of 28 bighorn sheep out of the habitat it had carefully helicoptered the animals into in 2006. The herd, near Theodore Roosevelt National Park, was being decimated by a sharp spike in the truck traffic that sprang up to serve the booming oil and gas Bakken shallow gas play in the northwest part of the state.

Transplanted bighorn populations struggle for decades to survive, and some, including this one, may never become viable. It was originally dropped into this landscape in response to a historical extermination; the intent was to fix an ecological hole in the ecosystem.

But the attempted repairs have now come undone because the state lacks the regulatory backbone –– or power –– to deal with the exploding energy industry. As a resident of Alberta, Canada, home of North America’s most destructive and unregulated oil and gas industry, I know what it’s like to be “rolled.” Very few political or democratic structures can stand their ground when an oil and gas industry tsunami hits. The industry lays a shroud of money, extracted almost exclusively from the public’s own purse, over its political, regulatory and media systems. North Dakota is just the most recent victim.

The oil and gas industry seems to view a fragile bighorn sheep population and its habitat as a “minor irritation” at best. And why not, when the very state agency created to manage and conserve such wildlife and habitat folds under the slightest pressure? Like many other state agencies, North Dakota’s Game and Fish has always struggled with professionalism, and it has never engaged in a down-and-dirty fight for the resources it was created to protect. Playing dead, however, only works for so long: You’ll get mauled when the dog finally wakes up, no matter how carefully and quietly you tiptoe around it.

The oil and gas industry has become one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the history of North American society. In North Dakota, it pays one of the lowest tax rates in the nation as it sucks up about a billion dollars in tax and regulatory freebees annually. By not paying its fair share through royalties and severance taxes, it pockets money it should be paying in taxes, depriving conservation agencies and citizens of adequate funding and an honest share of resource revenue. Thanks to these government handouts, it also buys political influence and regulatory lenience.

Now, North Dakota’s Fish and Game Department is adding another subsidy by moving a wildlife population out of harm’s way so the industry can exploit another landscape. The department has been cast aside, becoming a political pawn. In a way, one has to pity it: It’s behaving exactly like a street cleaner following the parade, picking up the poop deposited by the horses that star in the event.

I disagree with the chief of the Wildlife Division who said that his department “can’t do a thing about” protecting the bighorn sheep. There is a solution, and he should be up on his bully pulpit saying so. That is to put up to three 500-yard sections of the highway underground –– the stretches critical to bighorn movements –– and fence the rest so the road can’t keep on killing.

Like coyotes, I hear the good old boys yowling, “Why, that’s outrageous and expensive!” Perhaps it is, but it’s way past time to start putting the remnants of our wildlife first.

The North Dakota Legislature recently killed a bill creating a Heritage Fund; it was inadequate, but it would have given Game and Fish $10 million. Here is what should happen in its stead: The state should impose a conservation fee of 10 cents on every cubic foot of gas and $1 on every barrel of oil extracted from public land or exported from the state. In 2012 alone, that would have amounted to a land and water conservation fund of about $250 million. It is barely 1 percent of the market value of the petroleum and natural gas the state is giving up, but more than enough to build the underpasses that would help to keep the Little Missouri bighorn population intact.

The solution -- getting the incredibly profitable oil and gas industry to pay its fair share to the people whose land it exploits -- is sitting right there in the State Capitol. But it will take an indignant people to force it into place.

Brian Horejsi is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a longtime conservationist who lives in Alberta, Canada.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWriters on the Range2013/05/29 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleMammoth Hot Springs and the question of densityhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/mammoth-hot-springs-and-the-question-of-density
Yellowstone National Park's hot springs have become an industrial recreation site.Most Americans know about the geothermal extravaganza called Mammoth Hot Springs, nestled in a spectacular landscape in Yellowstone National Park.

It is also a place that must serve visitors as they enjoy this exceptional place and its amazing sights: A male bison weighing well over half a ton, with a toss of his head and a stutter step, shoos away a contingent of Asian tourists as they naively crowd his space. Or elk stepping between cars in a never-ending flow of vehicles and stopping traffic cold, or else pooping on the sidewalks, resting in the shade of the post office, or more dramatically, a large male elk in full rutting regalia, taking out the grill on a Jeep after its driver treats the animal with contempt.

This may provide riveting entertainment, but it also reveals that this historical site is threatening to burst both its human and ecological seams. The town is home to Yellowstone Park administration and staff and offices, plus almost 400 concession employees, many of whom live there as well. It also offers 678 ‘pillows’ to visitors, so close to 1200 people live and work in Mammoth. Add up to 3,500 people per day coming through the Gardiner, Mont., park entrance, and congestion doesn’t begin to describe what routinely happens here.

Most visitors do not understand that the animals they can reach out and touch number but a tiny minority of the park’s population. These large animals are the super-tolerant, the habituated. Mammoth lures them with its manicured lawns and nutritious green grass, artificial habitats that stand out in a sea of relatively dry native sagebrush and grasses. And strange as it may seem, some are there because they garner a degree of security from natural threats that are fended off by the swarms of humans.

This highly artificial situation presents hundreds of thousands of Americans and foreign visitors with a false view of the relationship between wildlife and industrial development. And make no mistake: Mammoth is an industrial recreation site.

No doubt, most visitors are thrilled by the bison and elk they see up close from May to June and from September to October. But many take away a jaded notion of wildlife. Visitors watch, with a hundred others, as elk breed outside the visitors center, and they burn up video cards filming bison on the lawn just yards from the dining room. To many people, lacking either a local or regional perspective, what they ‘know’ of wildlife comes from their experiences at Mammoth.

Volunteers and concessioner employees try to keep some physical and behavioral order between humans and wildlife, but it is notable that the Park Service does not run a full-time, intensive interpretive program in spring and fall -- even though it has a captive audience. This seems like a huge opportunity lost, even a major failure. Visitors who learn more about what they’re seeing and experiencing might take home a newly found or reinforced respect for wildlife. These visitors might even become park advocates.

It is a given that parks are meant to be different. Yellowstone doesn’t, for example, allow hunting, oil and gas drilling, logging, all-terrain vehicles or mountain bikes on trails. Protecting landscapes from these threats is what Americans believe national parks are meant to do. A consequence of this century-long conservation effort is that visitors do manage to have experiences in Yellowstone that are increasingly rare anywhere else.

Yet Yellowstone’s management has ambitions to make Mammoth monstrous by driving up visitor and employees-housing numbers, a scheme now in an advanced stage. This could lead to an abusive practice of heavy-handed wildlife control and selective killing by park staff, precisely like that which characterizes the blatant domination of commercialism over the well-being of wildlife and visitor-wildlife interaction in Banff National Park, Alberta, or even the anti-bison agenda of special interests, acting in close collaboration with the Park Service, on Yellowstone’s boundary in Montana and Idaho.

It is up to Americans to prevent this ill-conceived, Park Service-instigated growth at Mammoth. They should not be fooled; what is being proposed would herald a defeat for the conservation ethic and standards that have taken over a century to establish themselves in Yellowstone.

Brian Horejsi is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). An ecologist and wildlife scientist, he began his career at Montana State University with stops thereafter at the University of Alaska and the University of Calgary. For over 15 years, he has visited Yellowstone each year.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityWriters on the Range2013/03/07 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleMountain bikes are vehicles, toohttp://www.hcn.org/issues/43.21/mountain-bikes-are-vehicles-too
Mountain bikes are vehicles, and like all vehicle access, Nadia White and her partner got into a landscape they probably wouldn't have if they had to walk (HCN, 11/14/11, "Food and friendship, fossil-fuel free"). That's what happens when someone uses mechanical advantage to further access, and like all motorized and mechanical access, it degrades the experience, fragments the landscape, and displaces and harasses wildlife.

And since when are mountain bikes manufactured, shipped and sold in a carbon- or energy-free manner?